Guild Wars 2

For the past couple of days, my wife and I can’t play for more than 2 minutes without being disconnected with a 7:11:3:191:101 error. We’ve had no problems with other services like Netflix, Pingtest.net showed a great connection (grade A, 0% packet loss, 2ms jitter, ~23ms ping), and we’ve had no other problems with Guild Wars 2 for several months, at least. We’re on a wired network with cable internet service through Charter Communications.

So I started up my PingPlotter and monitored the hops between us and the Divinity’s Reach map I was in (using the /ip command to determine it was at 64.25.33.67). I observed that the connection was through several regionally-named Charter servers, then something with a domain name of “telia.net,” and finally to some “ncsoft.com” servers, one of which was the target.

I was disconnected within a minute or so and sent back to the character selection screen with the same 7:11:3:… error as before, so I Alt-Tabbed to the PingPlotter screen to see where the fault was. Surprisingly, nothing seemed amiss; everything was still pinging in the green.

That was last night (Central time), so I tried again early this morning, and everything seemed fine. I was relieved; I thought it had been fixed, whatever the problem was. Unfortunately, when my wife and I tried to play again about an hour ago, the problem quickly returned.

I eventually tried looking up all of the servers between us and the target IP using this website: http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/network-location/. It correctly identified my location and the target IP (the GW2 server in Texas), so I checked out the “telia.net” IPs. They all came up Switzerland! The connection seems to go from Atlanta, GA to Switzerland, then back to Austin, TX.

Is this expected behavior? Granted, it may not be the cause of our current connection issues, but maybe it’s a symptom of the same problem.

And no, we haven’t changed anything recently on the computers or the network. If anyone from ArenaNet is reading this, is there any way this could be an issue with your network or systems? The disconnects in particular; the fact that PingPlotter found no problems while I was getting kicked out of Guild Wars 2 suggests to me that it’s not a fault in our connection.

There are several topics about this error, 1 very long one among them where new threads used to get merged into.

For well over a year now, I regularly have annoying bouts of this exact error. I also have an otherwise perfect internet connection when that happens. Sometimes the error happens out of the blue, with no warning in the form of lag.

At other times, the error hits after very long periods of complete non-response from the game. I can run around and eventually hit an “edge at the end of the world”. Everything else is frozen and of course skills don’t work. When this happens, my location in the guild roster will turn into “Unknown”. I can still chat on all channels, I can still use the TP, I can still join and leave parties and operate guild and friend list fuctions. It can take up to 2 minutes before I finally get booted back to the character selection screen.

Apparently I don’t just have a perfect internet connection, all of ANet’s systems that run on separate servers are also working fine while this error occurs. It’s always just the game server itself that seems to lose track of me. (Location “Unknown” in the guild roster, as I mentioned before.)

Mapping IPs to real world locations is only an estimation. The owner can put whatever they want. Since Telia is located in Sweden, that would be their default location for unmapped IPs. If those IPs were actually located in Sweden, the response time would have jumped by ~100ms.

One of the hops on your route is probably the cause. It doesn’t matter if something else works because it’s likely on different route.

You can try using the -clientport 80/443 option, though it likely won’t help. To try a different route, you’d need to use a VPN. Other than that, all you can really do is wait it out or complain to your ISP.

Healix.5819:

One of the hops on your route is probably the cause. It doesn’t matter if something else works because it’s likely on different route.

Why would something else likely be on a different route? If that’s the case, what’s the point of a tool like PingPlotter, if it’s not even showing the same route that GW2 would use?

You can try using the -clientport 80/443 option, though it likely won’t help. To try a different route, you’d need to use a VPN. Other than that, all you can really do is wait it out or complain to your ISP.

I did try using a VPN, but it didn’t change anything.

RoyHarmon.5398:

Why would something else likely be on a different route? If that’s the case, what’s the point of a tool like PingPlotter, if it’s not even showing the same route that GW2 would use?

PingPlotter shows the route you take to the specified IP. That is your route to GW2. I was referring to other services, like how you said you had no problems with Netflix. Netflix isn’t hosted in the same location as GW2, thus you connect to it using a different route.

The internet is basically a network of roads. A hop is whenever the road splits into multiple paths. You don’t always take the same path when travelling to different places, but you may take the same path when travelling to the same place. Blocking one path will not block all of them, however the closer it is to your start point, the more trouble you’ll have.

RoyHarmon.5398:

I did try using a VPN, but it didn’t change anything.

You’ll need to try various VPN servers in an attempt to work around wherever the problem occurs. Ensure that the route through the VPN has sufficiently changed compared to your original one.

If you haven’t already, reset your modem/router and, if possible, try a direct connection.

Healix.5819:

RoyHarmon.5398:

Why would something else likely be on a different route? If that’s the case, what’s the point of a tool like PingPlotter, if it’s not even showing the same route that GW2 would use?

PingPlotter shows the route you take to the specified IP. That is your route to GW2. I was referring to other services, like how you said you had no problems with Netflix. Netflix isn’t hosted in the same location as GW2, thus you connect to it using a different route.

The internet is basically a network of roads. A hop is whenever the road splits into multiple paths. You don’t always take the same path when travelling to different places, but you may take the same path when travelling to the same place. Blocking one path will not block all of them, however the closer it is to your start point, the more trouble you’ll have.

RoyHarmon.5398:

I did try using a VPN, but it didn’t change anything.

You’ll need to try various VPN servers in an attempt to work around wherever the problem occurs. Ensure that the route through the VPN has sufficiently changed compared to your original one.

If you haven’t already, reset your modem/router and, if possible, try a direct connection.

I’m pretty sure the Internet is actually made of tubes. I heard it somewhere on the Internet, I think.

Also, it’s working fine now. No clue what the problem was, except that it must have been on ArenaNet’s end. As I said, the path between them and me was perfect (though the Switzerland thing was weird), but I was still being disconnected every 1-2 minutes. Now, nothing has changed, but it’s working great. I don’t know how it will be tomorrow, but there was nothing causing problems between me and ArenaNet’s servers. Therefore, it seems likely it was some glitch with ArenaNet’s servers. Obviously it didn’t affect everyone, but I wasn’t the only one experiencing these problems (according to map chat, that treasure trove of reliable data).

I would blame a service outage somewhere (I know Time Warner was having a lot of trouble in Texas, according to https://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable/map/), except PingPlotter showed a great ping at every stop.

Granted, Pingtest.net was only checking the route between me and Atlanta, so that wouldn’t test the whole route from me to Texas. It would, however, help to rule out problems on my end. That’s also why I mentioned Netflix; not because I’m new to the concept of networking, but because I was using it as evidence that I was actually connected to the Internet and that streaming high-definition movies was working pretty well. Yes, that could also be the case while having issues with Guild Wars, but considering that the disconnects were so frequent, I would have expected problems with just about anything else if it was on my end. Like Pingtest.net.

In summary, I wrote this thread to let someone at ArenaNet know that something weird is going on here, and to let other people chime in with their relevant experiences. There’s little I can do to affect it, if anything, though I certainly tried some of those “no reason this would help, but because I know some guy on a forum is going to suggest it, I’ll do it anyway” solutions. Nothing helped. Nothing, that is, but time.

You assume that the geolocation services have correct data, but that is not always the case. In case of your pingplotter image, you can be sure that all hops are in fact located in the US or at least in North America.

It can be deducted from the latency. If the data packets were routed to Switzerland (or generally, to Europe), they would cross the ocean, which adds about 120ms for each trip.
There is no internet site in Europe that has less than about 120ms latency if contacted from the US (and vice versa). This is simply because of the long distance.

In your graph, there is no such high latency. The low latency shows that the data packets don’t leave your continent. Whatever the geolocation services might say about the IP addresses: they are in fact located on your continent.

Global companies like Telia or even NCsoft/Arenanet tend to reallocate their address pools to foreign countries or even foreign continents, if they need address space, and the geolocation services don’t adapt fast enough. Even Arenanets european datacenter is an example for this: The network 64.25.47.* is located in TX, US according to whois, but in fact is located in Frankfurt, Germany, Europe. Otherwise I would not have a latency of only 12ms to it – I live almost next door.

Oh, I’m convinced it wasn’t really going to Switzerland. I just thought maybe it was indicative of some misconfiguration of the GW2 servers, possibly some confusion about which region (NA/EU) I was in, or something. I don’t know. But I need no further explanations about geolocation services.

Regardless, the problem seems to have gone away for now. I assume/hope that whatever glitch was causing my disconnections has been worked out.

Telia is simply an internet provider, an international one.

The first of your three highlighted hops was to the Telia’s router in Atlanta from Charter’s, then Telia’s in Dallas, then to NCSOFT’s Dallas’s router.